Innovation Engineering Jump Starts are fast and focused projects for accelerating profitable growth while providing a hands-on experience with the Innovation Engineering Management System.Jump Starts are one to three month projects involving three steps: education and Immersion into your challenge, one day jump start session, and project acceleration coaching.

Step 1: Education & Immersion into A Very Important Problem or OpportunityAll projects start with in-person conversations with the leader to define the project objective and/or the existing strategy that you would like help implementing. We confront reality on what level of innovation is requested, strategic areas that are not requested and any tactical or executional constraints. Projects can be focused on simply creating ideas for profitable growth or on one of the specialized Jump Start areas.

Existing Idea Acceleration

Technical Problem Solving Innovation

New Customer Development

New Product or Service Innovation

Existing Customer Development

Improved Product or Service Innovation

Sustainability Innovation

Sales and/or Marketing Message Innovation

LEAN Innovation

Export Acceleration Innovation

With the decision on project objective made, a team of four to twelve employees from inside your company, or outside vendors, customers, board members, etc., are selected to participate in the upcoming Jump Start session. The team is then educated through one or more classes, depending on the project objective, to prepare them for the session. They first complete stimulus mining assignments (customer insight, market, technology and future mining) to prepare for the Jump Start session. Findings are shared with others on the project team at a private I.E.Labs.com page.

Step 2: One Day Jump Start Session To Create & Define Ideas The full day Jump Start session features fresh stimulus to spark ideas developed and validated by the Innovation Engineering Black Belt community and developed by the participants during the previous training.

Each idea is defined with absolute clarity: Who is the Customer? What is their Problem? What Benefit Promise are we making? What’s the Proof that we can deliver on the promise? What are the Price and Profitability forecasts? What are the project Death Threats? More importantly, the team is challenged to develop and select ideas that are meaningful to three groups: a defined group of potential customers, the company itself, and to the team members personally.

At the conclusion of the Jump Start session two projects are selected for acceleration. Each project has a small team of four to six volunteers who commit to two to four hours of work each week accelerating the project through weekly Fail FAST Fail CHEAP learning cycles.

Step 3: Acceleration Coaching To Drive Innovation SuccessTo ensure that the big ideas become real, your I.E. Black Belt provides weekly coaching starting with two ideas to ensure that the teams don’t revert to the old way of thinking. The goal is to come to smart “go” or “no go” decision. Smart “no go” decisions are celebrated just as much as “go” decisions.

What’s Next?The conclusion of a successful Jump Start is a decision point for the company leader. Having seen the impact, some leaders are ready to commit to becoming actively involved in the process and leading an Innovation culture change effort with Innovation Engineering Management System. Other leaders are not ready for culture change. However, they have projects they need to accelerate. In these cases, another Innovation Engineering Jump Start is commissioned.

With our first idea from this, we could triple the size of our business.

Gary Marmer of Questech

The ideas developed were so effective they doubled our sales this past holiday season